In a couple of years, you're going to see the same thing with LVM. There'll be an article with a title along the lines of "LVM ends their experiment with Linux" in 2013 or 2014 or so.

What will kill this is the same thing that's killed Linux on the business desktop everywhere else... lack of commercial business apps and app support. Because even with idealogical issues aside, there is no "Linux OS". There are dozens of Linux OS's, and even "related" distros... such as Debian and Ubuntu... frequently have software that's incompatible.

That was a political decision, not a technical one. It came promptly after the Ministry went to a FDP member (that is the "Liberal" party here, essentially the sock puppet of every industry lobby in the country) and is currently the subject of several parliamentary enquiries. An analysis of the Government's official response can be found here [henning-tillmann.de] (sorry, German only).

There are free and paid support enterprise distros over a popular but unstable (and as far as I know still a home user focused) distro?

The only thing i can think of is that Canonical is a stable company (unlike Novel) and can undercut RH or do they want to move into the cloud.

I would think that suse/RH would have better security, package management, hardware compatibility with opensuse(my impression have no proof on this) and everything else that you want for a large company.

And Canonical has been around for a few years and is backed by a rogue billionaire who doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want. "I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year! You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars

So I welcome that, if people want to use their cloud facilities, good for them. It makes the company more stable and that's ultimately what's needed for Linux adoption. Busineses aren't run by geeks, they're run by people who need to know their money isn't going to be wasted b

Probably should have admitted package management from the post.I was meaning Zypper and Yum would have better enterprise features. I have yet to find a reliable non biased overview on it, so from the opensuse website.http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:RPM_sucks [opensuse.org] Mainly allowing multiple versions, vendor locks and deltas.Apt may currently have these google is not good at current information on this stuff.

The company will rush into this without any care to what is actually involved, will get frustrated when switching to a different OS will actually take some investment, and will eventually switch back when the short-term cost of training outweighs the recurrent cost of Windows licenses.

Does it really matter to the user if the information is in NIS, LDAP, the variant of LDAP known as Active Directory or even there at all if they use the same desktop machine or laptop all of the time?The only thing they care about is if they can log in and get their stuff.There are many ways to do that. MS Windows may be the new boy on the block at that game with the fancy GUI tools but it's an old problem with a huge number of solutions.

She's been on XP on an older machine and had been playing a few games that kept her there. She just recently started complaining about WinXP acting "weird" and having firefox hanging up. I slapped Suse 11.4 KDE on her machine and told her to let me know if something didn't work.

First day in and her words were: "I don't see what's different" and "It looks the same".

I was away at work. She installed Quicken via Wine and didn't even realize that it was any different than being in WinXP. But then came some coupon printer she's been using. That doesn't work. I'm looking at running a virtual machine just for that purpose.

As I'm typing this, she just plugged in our camera for the first time."This won't work in here huh?""Plug it in, you'll see"Up pops the camera application and away she goes without further prompting.

She's not very tech savvy. But she's not on the job either and can wait for me to show her how to get stuff done.

It does seem to be rarer on 7. I've seen it happen many times, but always as a result of a hardware problem or filesystem corruption. Perhaps better process isolation?

The filesystem corruption is still a bother though, just because it shouldn't happen. Why - really, WHY? - does Windows have vital system files open for writing at all times? Perhaps something to do with how it crams all it's configuration data into the registry. It makes it quite prone to getting horribly mangled if you don't shut it down

The non-technical user is a creature of habbit. I've seen them in a confused panic after Windows so much as takes an icon off the start menu quick-shortcuts, and when the ribbon came to office you'd thing the world was ending. If the save dialog looks a little different, or a menu item isn't where it used to be, they can't work.

The non-technical user is a creature of habbit. I've seen them in a confused panic... when the ribbon came to office you'd thing the world was ending

I will admit, I still haven't figured out the ribbon thing. I've used the hell out of Office 2003 and before. But, every time I sit down to a machine with 2007 or later I get frustrated and either go back to a machine with an earlier version I get frustrated and just install OpenOffice.

I am a "quick key" user (or keyboard short cuts) and none of them work the way I was used to in earlier versions of Word, so I have to "Icon Hunt" which is such an unproductive feeling.

Maybe, but the main reason is the simplest one. People simply don't want Linux. It's free, and still people don't use it. Years ago, this was blamed on MS's monopoly, and there may have been some truth to that at the time, because then computer users were a self-selecting group that was more technically adept than today, where everyone uses a computer.

But now, Linux brings nothing to the table that is of interest to most people, while instead having lot

We have about 100 PC's now. The main application is in Java and most of the PC's (about 70) run Ubuntu Linux. The others run various versions of Windows. We have one guy who manages the Windows boxes and it's a full time job. We spend several thousand in license fees for MS Office, basically for simple spreadsheets and documents).

The Linux boxes require virtually no administration once they are setup, a process which takes between 15 and 20 minutes. Some of them have been running unchanged since 2002. I wri

I'm skeptical about the frequently discussed difficulty of adoption if it's well planned. If most of the companies tools are web-based (and not forced to use MS due to dependencies on ActiveX, and the like) then it's entirely feasible that you wouldn't need to retrain employees much at all. The next major hurdle is email and document publishing. I'd be curious to see their adoption plan and the results.

I just helped a lot of people (>3K) adapt to W7 from XP. I know some stuff about enterprise stuff.

It's all about the apps. There are hundreds of enterprise line-of-business apps that are custom crafted to work with IE6 and its plugins. Getting them to work with a different version of IE is a nightmare. We put it over, mostly, but we had to brute force a lot of it. Some of it just would not go and was writ off as a cost of staying current. That story's not over yet, as some critical apps conflict with each other in W7.

If they had cared to craft their line-of-business apps with a server backend and a standards-compliant browser front end, we'd have saved a few hundred thousand dollars. But they didn't, they still don't, and they won't.

Go ahead - standardize on the next version of this crud. The unit cost goes up every year. Making it work is a grind, but if you didn't take it up, we'd have little work. That Linux and iOS stuff just works and there's no service money in that for me.

That's pretty much it: where is the economic interest in getting end user apps migrated? Linux works great in a datacenter and works great for end users who are experienced with it. But where's the economic incentive to adapt users? If most everyone used linux in their homes that would kill off virtually Hundreds of thousands of jobs supporting the crap. No more $70 mom and pop shop reloads, no more field service calls that are resolved by running virus cleaner and repairing an infected machine, no more recycled machines that get put back into circulation simply because the owners perceives an infected machine as a hardware failure or simply not worth the investment in repair over an opportunity to "upgrade."

I use linux more than a decade now, and I can't imagine the hell of having to use windows again. And I feel kinda sorry for all those people out there who really don't know any better, who think windows is the only solution because they hate macs and believe the nonsense about linux sucking as a desktop. But I'm sure not going to go out of my way to convince them of their delusion.

People will indeed. But Ubuntu forums are free, and viruses alone are a major fraction of all problems encountered by "people". I know Windows Defenders (tm) will allege that Windows isn't intrinsically insecure or unstable, but historically, Windows is insecure and unstable. So much for the people -- in the corporate environment the real issue is scalability. Linux is enormously, absurdly, cheaply, scalable in a sensibly run enterprise environment. Standardize on a reasonably small set of hardware platforms, and things like kickstart and yum make it possible for one sysadmin to support far, far more people than one sysadmin can support in any Windows environment I've ever heard of. Automated installation is easy, automated upgrade is easy, security is easy and effective (because the Unix-derived client-server networking model has always been reasonably secure) viruses are all but unknown and with standard root vs user privilege control ordinary users can't really infect their systems with viruses that matter.

Linux has two or three problems. One is hardware support. In a wide-open home/laptop/desktop environment, it is difficult to guarantee that any particular piece of hardware is going to run, or at least be easy to get to run, under linux. But there is a more than spanning set of hardware to choose from that does run, and run well, and a skilled systems person can usually get almost all of the rest to work (eventually) with some effort. In a corporate environment, all this really means is that you should shop carefully for systems, something that you should do anyway even with Windows, and test prototypes to make sure that they will install and run well.

Another is marketing -- Microsoft has an enormous staff of people devoted to promoting their product, cutting deals that maintain their lock on various markets, advertising on television and in other media, and sowing FUD about any and all competing products. I can't find online statistics on this, but I'll bet that Microsoft has at least two marketing/business people for every software engineer or technical support person. Linux has virtually none.

The third is software. Like it or not, there is plenty of software in the Universe that only runs on Windows platforms. Not Linux, not Macs. Just Windows. There is far more software that runs on Linux (often only on Linux) these days -- there are literally tens of thousands of programs and libraries available, nearly all of them free, most of them of remarkably high quality. However, most corporate software, game software, and commercial software is written for Windows (or written by Apple for Apples on a proprietary basis). The reason here is obvious as well -- you make a lot more money with a proprietary package written for the most common operating system, especially when there is relatively little free software available for that system. If you try to write proprietary software for Linux systems, you face user resistance (everything else they use is free, why should they pay for your application?), you have to watch encumbrances such as GPL viral code or libraries, you risk being functionally cloned by your users in short order, and the "brilliant idea" underlying your application may well already be written and working fine under Linux, given its vast already existing library of free software.

If your business doesn't need proprietary packages -- just e.g. straight up office software, browsers, web servers, databases, and not this or that specific accounting package or word processor, then enterprise level Linux will save you a fortune. Even if you do, it is probably cheaper and simpler to still run enterprise level Linux everywhere and confine Windows to VMs only on those desktops that need it.

Windows security has gotten better. In the 9x days, it was laughable. In XP, it became merely pathetic. With seven, it could be promoted as far as 'poor.' But the problem remains: Windows is made to be all things to all people, and specifically for non-technical users. Ease of use comes at the expense of security, and means the users stay dumb.

To be charitable in a left-handed way, some of the users would stay dumb no matter what operating system they use. But most can be educated and hand-held to limited functionality with a certain set of tools, even if you still find them only using the five or six menu entries you showed them in a give GUI tool four years later...

UAC is a bit of a joke, but this can be blamed as much on third-party devs as Microsoft. The dialog pops up so often, users - even the more technical ones - just get into the habbit of clicking OK and ignoring it. I have it do the chime-and-grey-screen thing every time I open a RAR file. Don't know why. It's a nice try, but just not quite there. In large part because many windows devs are used to just assuming admin access would always be there. We've been through this once before, when migrating from each

and viruses alone are a major fraction of all problems encountered by "people".

How does this happen? Windows Vista and Windows 7 use UAC to control access to Administrators-group privileges. Without these privileges, viruses can't infect programs in the Program Files folder, which is writable only by users in the Administrators group. A virus running on Windows 7 would need to show a UAC prompt not unlike that of gksudo under Ubuntu. Or are you referring to users of Windows XP who haven't created a limited user account?

One is hardware support. In a wide-open home/laptop/desktop environment, it is difficult to guarantee that any particular piece of hardware is going to run, or at least be easy to get to run, under linux. But there is a more than spanning set of hardware to choose from that does run, and run well

In my experience, Windows support tends to entail fixing things that don't work as expected, while Linux support tends to entail adding useful features that don't already exist. It's actually quite profitable, for everyone, to be able to tell a client that Linux is limited only by your imagination and your budget, and that anything that doesn't work exactly as you expect can be modified. There's a reason IBM makes lots of money on Linux services, and creates lots of value for happy customers in the proces

In one place of work, we managed to get Firefox added to the new standard build by the simple expedient of writing lots of in-house web apps that didn't work in IE. (The tool used by about 20 people every day they worked there, which was broken in IE for six months with no-one noticing...)

If they had cared to craft their line-of-business apps with a server backend and a standards-compliant browser front end, we'd have saved a few hundred thousand dollars.

we managed to get Firefox added to the new standard build by the simple expedient of writing lots of in-house web apps that didn't work in IE.

Were these apps standards-compliant or Firefox-specific?

This is also the same way we kept Vista at bay.

Mozilla Firefox runs fine on Windows Vista and Windows 7. What exactly are you talking about? Are you talking about intentionally developing applications that don't run on Windows Vista because they break Microsoft's guidelines?

1) Businesses that had never developed a Windows culture. Burlington Coat Factory, Pep Boys, Autozone.... They were able to switch easily.2) Businesses with a tech culture that was windows based but were highly motivated. Oracle, IBM,... Some were failures and some successes. Generally failure.3) Businesses with a standard end user culture but highly motivated. Midsized on down successes have been known, I don't know of any large corpor

The project included the conversion of 3,000 desktop and laptop computers in LVM's Muenster HQ with a further 7,000 in the company's agencies around Germany. The core software used by the company is LAS, a Java-based claims-processing application of its own design, backed by Lotus Notes, Adobe's Reader and the OpenOffice suite.

(03/30/2011) For its commitment to open standards and free software is replaced by the city of Munich as part of the global campaign "Document Freedom Day" by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), an award that was contrary to Munich's mayor Christine Strobl IT now . "The city of Munich shows a model that can reach a large German Government on Free Software. With the project LiMux Munich is in the use of open standards is a pioneer in Germany and in Europe. We hope that this modern and open attitude by many imitators, "pointed Karsten Gerloff, president of FSFE, emphasized at a small ceremony in Munich's town hall, attended by the municipal IT managers Gertraud Loesewitz, head of IT, Karl -Heinz Schneider, LiMux project leader Peter Hofmann, staff of the LiMux project teams, departments and representatives of the Open Source community took part in Munich. "Munich is a citizen-driven, flexible and open city. This is also reflected in the use of open standards and free software. With the use of open source software, we also strengthen the economy in Munich, by giving the many Munich-based IT service providers the opportunity to participate in the development "explained Mayor Strobl Munich motivation for LiMux.

"LiMux" is presently the largest Linux project in the public sector. With it, the state capital Munich to 2013 about 80 percent of its 15 000 PC workstations on the free operating system Linux. All PC workstations are already equipped since 2009 with an open communication office (OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, Firefox) and almost 6,000 computers have been converted to the Munich-based Linux operating system. The state capital also has the single document template system, developed WollMux 'which is as free software under the European Union Public License (EUPL) published and other users for free as an open standard available (www.wollmux.org).

I would still call that a success, even if they were initially naïve in some respects.

Yep, this is really about this sort of change exposing all the very poor IT decisions done before. A migration to Linux shows many of these problems but even migrations to the next version of Windows often brings a lot of them to light. Companies seem to have a never-ending ability for short-sightedness. Look at all the places that did their entire websites in Flash or coded for IE6 not to mention Small/Medium business's prolific use of Quickbooks.

WTF is this "learning a new OS all over again" stuff? You talk as if most of the staff have to fire up the CLI and get shocked when their beloved dos commands don't work.

Many people spend much of their time either in a browser or some productivity suite. Since Firefox has made huge inroads the past decade, it's not so much a worry. Most mainstream browser have negligible GUI differences. That leave the productivity suite -- which, since I don't really muck with, I can't gauge and someone will have to answer.

What worries me is the 5% cases where it's either hardware like a network scanner that worked with proprietary software or some unique app.

What worries me is the 5% cases where it's either hardware like a network scanner that worked with proprietary software or some unique app.

That's a valid concern in general, but in this specific case if a company with at least 10,000 employees wasn't dilligent enough to make sure any hardware and custom software they needed to do their jobs ran in linux, the problem is huge and nothing at all to do with linux.

Also, being a big company gives some clout when dealing with vendors. When Joe User goes to the printer manufacturer and says 'my printer doesn't work with linux' he'll get a form letter saying the company does not support that operating system. When a company goes and says 'This printer doesn't work with linux. By the way, we have fifty printers and replace them every three years. If not with yours, then someone else's' then the manufacturer is going to see that more of a valid business case.

1. Larger printers almost invariably support Postscript and/or PCL. More-or-less guaranteed universal support (though you may not get all the functionality you'd like in some OSs) is therefore trivial.2. It's quite common for larger companies to lease printers rather than buy them, for a number of reasons:

You generally have all your technical support in just one location. But you have branches (and hence printers) all over the place. How will you deal with repair when

Personally, on my Ubuntu systems I use Excel on Wine if I really need to use that old crap. It works as well as can be expected for Excel Macros.

OpenOffice has a much better word processor than MS Office 2003, which is what is still in use in much of the UK. Its quite easy to persuade people that its a free alternative to the hated Office2007 which eats screen space.And it opens their office97 documents reliably.

My day job involves software targeted towards small to medium sized businesses... and let me tell you, the most TINY and seemingly trivial change in appearance (including color), behavior, or operation is noticed, felt, and a source of huge training issues, complaints, and drama, on a day to day basis.

Recent versions of windows are only OK because the hardware the businesses run on generally can't do Aero -- but even then, the Start Menu changes in Windows Vista and such were a huge source of drama. Fortunately, desktop shortcuts are there and haven't changed, so people just don't click on Start anymore.

That "ribbon" UI thing MIcrosoft is doing with its latest batch of Office, though? That's so totally unworkably different that we've had quite a few customers suddenly looking towards OpenOffice/just because/ the differences were less stark... whereas a few years ago, those differences (the/little/ bits) were things they couldn't get the time or resources to deal with.

I'm talking about people who don't understand that there's a difference between minimizing and closing an application: (let alone the difference between a document and an application). And this isn't some obscure, rare group we've run into: and neither is it a new phenomenon.

There's a frankly HUGE chunk of people out there who use a computer as a series of rote actions, with no real understanding of what's going on, and no -attempt- to understand the metaphors or flow of the process or programs. They know the entire operation as a firm, strict and unyielding series of precise steps and the slightest deviation throws them completely out of the loop. (And, half of these people are quite capable of doing their jobs very fast and efficiently this way).

Seriously. This is reality in a LOT of areas and a LOT of businesses and its not going to go away for a decade or three when they all retire and are replaced by a younger generation that grew up more computer-literate. (Its not even KINDA there now, in '11. Not even kinda.)

I once found a user who managed her files by opening Word, going to the open dialog and using that window to create folders and place files in them. When I went to support her on an unrelated issue I clicked the 'my documents' icon and she was so amazed, she submitted another ticket the next day asking me to teach her how to do that.

Users should not have to learn all the technology of a computer in order to use it (That's our job), but never underestimate just how incredibly ignorant they are. I imagine th

I'll admit to liking that "emergency chance" to fiddle with files with some open/save dialog in flux. It's my quick chance to go fix something when I'm mainly doing something else. However, it's not my primary way to deal with files when I am "dealing with files".

At my work, they've installed XP Professional with the latest version of the office suite. Because I'm a power user with some clout, they allowed me local administrator rights, but told me that anything out of line and they'll drop me back to general user.

I could not get used to the MSOffice ribbon. I'm sure that if I took the time, I could figure it out. It's just not worth the time. So I installed LibreOffice. (I told the IT department ahead of time, and they

These people are often able to automate what they know to a degree that I couldn't without a lot of Googling and trial and error: and others I've encountered have been just the same on MacOS (7, 8, 9, etc). Its not about "experience" (how are you grading that? time? in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of the system?), its about how some people approach the computer. It doesn't matter what OS they use. None are better then any other. I've had to deal with some of the most god-awful custom little programs with the most horrid user interfaces -- and in the end, there is this significant class of user to whom that's not different then the well-designed, elegant interfaces. Sure, one may take longer then the other to develop the rotes -- but one class of user will use the computer as a computer, and another will use it via a series of rote actions they perform to achieve an end.

Some will always approach it as a specific tool to set towards a specific use: these people have no vested interest or desire (for any number of reasons) in learning to master it or understand it. It is, to them, simply an "application appliance".

Details like "minimize" and "close" are meaningless. The task at hand is there in front of them, or it is not.

The appliance does precisely what they expect, exactly, without any even slight deviation -- including wording, where items are and precisely how they are represented in the interface, and nuances of behavior. They are able to use this tool through pure muscle-memory. Its not because the interface is "bad": its because of how they learned it and use it. Its not even that they're stupid, or even old, or illiterate, or.. anything.

It's just how real people end up using things they don't care about, aren't interested in, and just... use.

The computer (its OS, and the applications) is a means to an end: its metaphors are an attempt to engage and express on a level that a lot of people just don't give a shit about.

And no matter how great you make it, how wonderful the interface, how programmable and automatable (? such a strange claim for you to put forth-- that programmability and automation have something to do with these users not really understanding their system -- I wonder if you've ever been tech support, be it for family, or commercially) it is, how simple it all seems to be. There'll be the people who won't invest. And use it as a series of rote actions.

Many people were caught out by the change in Office - I'm not a n00b but I remember searching high and low to print my Word documents, never thinking for a second that the 'orb' was in fact the new version of the 'file' menu.

I notice that I wasn't the only one as Office 2010 has replace the orb with a big orange menu called 'File'. Crazy huh.

But there's a lot more like this in modern Windows - a lack of consistency that used to be there and demonstrated that it was actually designed, now you feel its just kludged together by different groups who want to do things differently. eg. I used to change the back window colour from white to a ever so slightly pale cream, almost so you wouldn't notice but that would take the edge off the glare. Go to display properties, click the window back colour, edit it and every window suddenly was easier to look at. Today, you'll find many windows don't respect that colour - even explorer doesn't let you change the font! You have a choice of.. no choice. This is the new order of Windows - a lack of internal consistency that makes Linux's distributed development look like perfection.

Windows used to be held up as a system that you could learn once and forever understand - every app had the menu bar, every app had a file menu. This is no longer true, and it only makes sense that companies are starting to realise this as they see the bill from MS for licences for new OSs that cost even more in training (not just for users, think of how the control panel has changed - your tech support needs to understand how to set an IP address in the new Network and Sharing Center, not the ancient-but-worked network properties)

I see this in the phone software - no-one cares about Microsoft as a brand, when they have the chance they go with alternatives. I hope this will continue to break up that desktop monopoly.

Fitt's Law [wikipedia.org] roughly states that the things that get the most use should be the most available, the biggest, and the closest to an anchor (usually the sides/corners of a window.)
Ribbon interfaces are designed around Fitt's Law and the idea that the menus should taking up less screen space.

Based on the article, it is not an issue at all. They are dealing with a core Java application, OpenOffice, and Adobe Reader. The former presumably has been tested and operates properly under Linux. The latter applications are also available for Linux. It was also noted that they are using an older version of Windows, which means that some/all of the employees would have to learn how to use a "different OS" (presumably Windows 7) all over again. Yes, some would have been using that different OS on their personal machines, but those skills don't necessarily carry over very well to work environments.

It is worth considering that many corporate machines have highly customized configurations to start with, most of which are intended to improve security or the manageability of their systems. This ties into what I said about skills used on personal machines don't necessarily carry over to corporate machines. Many corporate machines lock out all but a subset of applications that the employees are permitted to use. This includes standard components of the operating system (e.g. the desktop shell).

Now I cannot comment fully on this company's situation, but it is highly probable that this decision was highly thought out from both a technical and employee level.

There really isn't much to learn. Seriously. Browsers work the same, word processors work very much the same, Java and Flash work the same. The desktop can even look the same as Windows, if the people who are spending the money decide it's important that users "feel at home".

The average data inputting person will have to spend a week or two, learning how to access the database and other routine chores. Anyone competent to use an applicaton in Windows can become competent with similar apps on Linux within months, if not weeks. Obviously, the company thinks the "investment" worthwhile. Funny thing is, the only "failures" I've read about when companies/governments switch to Linux involved campaigns launched by proprietary concerns.

Linux fails on one front, only. Linux fails when it comes to offering kickbacks and bribes to decision makers.

3 months ago I've made a linux migration of desktops with XP, on a small business with 25 employes. I've chosen Ubuntu desktop for Desktop, and Centos for the file and printer server, and kept 1 windows box, with Microsoft Office installed.I have to say that the previous experience of this workers with Oo.org helped, but a lot of myths about people adaptation difficulty are, if not untrue, at least deeply exaggerated. I confessed I've expected a lot of more problems.The end result was this: the company didn

Alternatively they would have to learn Win7 from scratch. And if their work is with something like TIA, then what OS they are running is absolutely irrelevant. They could work in kiosk mode, for all they care.
Some people just plain fail to understand that Win7 is very different to WinXP in appearance. While the interaction model is actually shared across Windows and Linux.

Most employees won't have any problems with an IT rollout with the applications installed. It takes little effort to learn where the Ubuntu Start Button is. Using Firefox to launch the company's cloud computing is not difficult.

The year of Linux is slowly being ushered in. I'm seeing much more computer hardware being listed on the retail shelf as Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux compatible. I'm seeing this on mice, cameras, sound and video capture devices, headsets, etc. Linux is slowly making an appearance

You're trolling, but for the benefit of those who don't know better, I'll reply.

GP refers to the ease with which Linux systems can be locked down to prevent common users from accessing a USB drive. System administrators who are competent can do the same with Windows, but there seem to be many sysadmins who are incompetent, and fail to lock USB access from common users.

If it goes out via the network, you can use network-based measures to stop it - firewalls, logging. A good policy is to block all outgoing connections except those to required services (update servers, etc) and your own web-proxy and email-proxy, both of which log everything. The users can still steal data, but not without you knowing who did it.

Nothing to stop them using their phone to take a picture of the screen though.

I remember working with a travel agency early in my career. Their employees could type the craziest commands into the SABRE system that made me feel stupid. Yet, something as simple as, say, cancelling a print job in Windows left them stumped and getting in touch with the IT department.

So I agree with you. Users don't care about the operating system. They just want to get their work done. As long as the applications themselves do not differ in any significant way, nobody will notice.

Most of us are living in 2011, which means Linux desktop environments didn't suck and have actually looked quite nice (matter of taste of course, Personally I prefer KDE4's look to Win7) for a couple of years by now,... here are a couple of videos to bring you back to this decade/century : starting at 20' [youtube.com], here [youtube.com], here [youtube.com], and here [youtube.com]... and that's just KDE4.6. Plenty other good looking, fast and easy to use WM/DE's where that comes from, or just do yourself a favour and educate yourself by trying some liveCD.

Linux is great on the desktop, but when you sleep/resume cycle it 10 times, strange things start to happen. Also when moving around and connecting weird USB thingies.

I have similar experiences. I like Linux as much as the next guy, but there is still lots of fragile stuff, especially on laptops. Many times something weird (or simply nothing) happens and I have to go digging through the logs for the cause. Lots of unimplemented stuff here and there, too.

They should leave windows on the laptops. The reason that they can switch to Linux is that the OS is mostly irrelevant for the end user. So it makes sense to use the OS that's best for the hardware.

I gather the government of China is trying to go to linux now. Not for technical reasons, but because they really don't want to be so dependant upon a US company. That's still a lot of stations, so it will provide quite the incentive for companies to support it.